SSD or HDD for use as a clone drive?

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OutlawJoseyWales

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So are there any reasons one would use a HDD over an SSD as the backup clone of your laptop's drive. I have both lying around.

The SSD would be powered up now and then when cloning so that is not an issue.

The SSD currently has my Windows 10 OS on it, but I have moved over to Linux and don't see myself going back to Windows. Besides which I also have a HDD clone of the Windows 10 OS.
 
OutlawJoseyWales said:
So are there any reasons one would use a HDD over an SSD as the backup clone of your laptop's drive. I have both lying around.

The SSD would be powered up now and then when cloning so that is not an issue.

The SSD currently has my Windows 10 OS on it, but I have moved over to Linux and don't see myself going back to Windows. Besides which I also have a HDD clone of the Windows 10 OS.
Click to expand...
Why not create an image and store the image instead of having a drive laying around ?
 
OutlawJoseyWales said:
I use the clone in case my current SSD fails, then just insert the clone and away I go.
Click to expand...
The liklihood of failure is low, the effort to create clones in order to have up to date backup if high.
What type of failure are you trying to protect from ?
An image takes the same effort to create as cloning the drive, with slightly more effort if recovery is required, but again how often would that be.

I would re-evaluate the use case and see if there's a better way to protect from it.
 
Zuner said:
The liklihood of failure is low, the effort to create clones in order to have up to date backup if high.
What type of failure are you trying to protect from ?
An image takes the same effort to create as cloning the drive, with slightly more effort if recovery is required, but again how often would that be.

I would re-evaluate the use case and see if there's a better way to protect from it.
Click to expand...

Say a bad update from one Mint OS version to another. Any major failure I guess, like a SSD failure.

It's just the way I have always done it.
 
Chances are you will be using a USB 3.2 SSD or HDD.

HDD top transfer rate will be about 100MB/sec. (cheap)
A SATA3 SSD will give you a top speed of 300MB/sec. (less cheap)
An NVME USB 3.2 connected SSD will give you a max speed of 1050MB/sec. (expensive)
A Thunderbolt 4 or 5 NVME SSD will give you about 3000MB/sec (very expensive)
 
Use macrium and make an image of the drive that you can store on the Linux machine or a different external drive
 
SSD degrades and loses data without power, whereas HDD will store it indefinitely. In such a case, I would prefer the HDD (and if failure occurs, then close the HDD to an SSD to get back working).
 
Claymore said:
SSD degrades and loses data without power, whereas HDD will store it indefinitely. In such a case, I would prefer the HDD (and if failure occurs, then close the HDD to an SSD to get back working).
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Yeah that is what I have decided to do.

How does one return an SSD to factory status so that it can just sit on the shelf indefinitely until I need it?
So in other words there is no data on it, it will just sit on the shelf until I need it to replace the old one.

Do you just need to delete partitions and format it? Or is there more to it?
 
OutlawJoseyWales said:
So are there any reasons one would use a HDD over an SSD as the backup clone of your laptop's drive. I have both lying around.

The SSD would be powered up now and then when cloning so that is not an issue.

The SSD currently has my Windows 10 OS on it, but I have moved over to Linux and don't see myself going back to Windows. Besides which I also have a HDD clone of the Windows 10 OS.
Click to expand...
HDD or High end MLC ssd
 
OutlawJoseyWales said:
So are there any reasons one would use a HDD over an SSD as the backup clone of your laptop's drive. I have both lying around.

The SSD would be powered up now and then when cloning so that is not an issue.

The SSD currently has my Windows 10 OS on it, but I have moved over to Linux and don't see myself going back to Windows. Besides which I also have a HDD clone of the Windows 10 OS.
Click to expand...
I would use the HDD.

The main reason being is that I would rather use the SSD in another device as the primary drive.
The SSD is wasted as a backup drive because its main benefit is speed.

In my case I might even run VM's off that SSD to have a nice speedy slave.
 
OutlawJoseyWales said:
Yeah that is what I have decided to do.

How does one return an SSD to factory status so that it can just sit on the shelf indefinitely until I need it?
So in other words there is no data on it, it will just sit on the shelf until I need it to replace the old one.
Click to expand...

Some drives have secure erase with their own utilities, eg Samsung or Sandisk. But others don't.

But you don't need to return to factory status. You can just keep the drive on the shelf. Over years of non usage the data may degrade but the drive itself will be fine.

SSDs have two issues. One is heat. So if it's next to your GPU/CPU and heats up all the time, that's not good. Second is the write cycles. If your SSD undergoes too many write cycles, it will physically degrade and some cells will no longer be able to write new data and will be marked as bad. For even the cheapest modern SSDs (QLC) can write many TBs before this happens.

Google your SSD make, model and size for the TBW value. Usually it's something like 300TBW for the cheap ones, and 1200TBW for the expensive ones. Even that 300TBW is not a guarantee the drive will fail after it writes that much, it means it reached the end of what's guaranteed. Samsung drives are known for having real TBW values of 2x-5x the actual mentioned value.

OutlawJoseyWales said:
Do you just need to delete partitions and format it? Or is there more to it?
Click to expand...

With SSDs there is always the possibility of data recovery because of wear leveling. There is no such thing as overwriting 7 times as per a HDD.

If you are worried about sensitive data, create an encrypted partition on your SSD like say using Bitlocker or Mac OS File Vault. That way only encrypted data is stored on the SSD. If that is ever recovered it will still be encrypted.
 
Mirai said:
Some drives have secure erase with their own utilities, eg Samsung or Sandisk. But others don't.

But you don't need to return to factory status. You can just keep the drive on the shelf. Over years of non usage the data may degrade but the drive itself will be fine.

SSDs have two issues. One is heat. So if it's next to your GPU/CPU and heats up all the time, that's not good. Second is the write cycles. If your SSD undergoes too many write cycles, it will physically degrade and some cells will no longer be able to write new data and will be marked as bad. For even the cheapest modern SSDs (QLC) can write many TBs before this happens.

Google your SSD make, model and size for the TBW value. Usually it's something like 300TBW for the cheap ones, and 1200TBW for the expensive ones. Even that 300TBW is not a guarantee the drive will fail after it writes that much, it means it reached the end of what's guaranteed. Samsung drives are known for having real TBW values of 2x-5x the actual mentioned value.



With SSDs there is always the possibility of data recovery because of wear leveling. There is no such thing as overwriting 7 times as per a HDD.

If you are worried about sensitive data, create an encrypted partition on your SSD like say using Bitlocker or Mac OS File Vault. That way only encrypted data is stored on the SSD. If that is ever recovered it will still be encrypted.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I guess we all have some sensitive data but I was more curious if you store an SSD long term with data on it or if it's clean if one or the other is better for the drive, but you have said no. I just deleted the partitions so that it says Free Space and left it at that.

I made a mistake buying a Crucial BX500 as it is a QLC. I needed another one, so bought the Mushkin Source 2 on special from Woot which is a TLC (for less than the Crucial!) and use that as my laptop drive. I'm happy with the Mushkin and the way I use my drives (not too much writing, etc.) I think it will last a long time and now have the Crucial as a backup just in case.

Is it just the writing that is a problem or is reading also an issue? Every now and then I make a clone of the SSD to a HDD, so it only reads the data on the SSD and writes to the HDD. About 140GB written each time.
 
OutlawJoseyWales said:
Thanks. I guess we all have some sensitive data but I was more curious if you store an SSD long term with data on it or if it's clean if one or the other is better for the drive, but you have said no. I just deleted the partitions so that it says Free Space and left it at that.

I made a mistake buying a Crucial BX500 as it is a QLC. I needed another one, so bought the Mushkin Source 2 on special from Woot which is a TLC (for less than the Crucial!) and use that as my laptop drive. I'm happy with the Mushkin and the way I use my drives (not too much writing, etc.) I think it will last a long time and now have the Crucial as a backup just in case.

Is it just the writing that is a problem or is reading also an issue? Every now and then I make a clone of the SSD to a HDD, so it only reads the data on the SSD and writes to the HDD. About 140GB written each time.
Click to expand...

Check the TBW spec. I'm sure your SSDs will outlive your PC unless you write to them 24/7.
 
Most modern motherboards have a secure erase in the Bios too that you can just use.

As for the "Check the TBW spec. I'm sure your SSDs will outlive your PC unless you write to them 24/7." above..
...yeah that depends entirely on the user, as an example I eat through 20-40tb a month write cycles.

the only ssd I have seen outlive the rated TBW was my old ancient OCZ agility 120gb.. that thing had a 40tbw rating and it wrote well over 300tb without failing. Was just replaced 'cause it was the oldschool ssd's that were only 200mb/s speeds, whereas nowadays its so common for ssd's to fail wellbefore even hitting their rated cycles.

Samsung's.. the old mlc drives from 970 evo/pro days etc were the good stuff, most their crap now is just sticker tax + tlc chips with m0erse high layer counts that wear out very fast.
 
PatchTuesday said:
Use macrium and make an image of the drive that you can store on the Linux machine or a different external drive
Click to expand...
From what I saw he uses linux.. so macrium will be a hit or miss for him depending on the filesystem he chose. ext2/3/4 supported, the rest not officially, so if it k@ks out if he's on say BTRFS then its not macrium's problem. It does run a slower sector copy on the newer filesystem's which in most cases succeed. but your mileage my vary

Foxclone would be the more stable option, even rescue/clonezilla is in experimental stage for most of the newer filesystems on linux.

The above is for disk to disk clones ( then you need to manually resize the larger drive to fit on a smaller one if that's the case. From what i've seen only foxclone does it automagically like macrium if there's enough free space at the end of the destination drive. (meaning source drive has less data in total than the target drive's total storage size)

Disk to image doesnt matter what the filesystem is, always works apparently... i never trust images, always one random one that ends up failing gloriously somehow... even if its verified etc
 
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